28 April 2020

Half-Orc Bruiser & Stuff! In the Mail!


I need more (half-) orc bruisers for my Sellswords & Spellslingers games. I have a small stash of Reaper Bones orcs that were slated for conversion to Fomorians. But since that project has taken a back seat lately, I figured it wouldn't hurt to paint a couple of them up to add to the horc force.


I've got a second one on the painting table, and I'm considering trying a few conversions for variety.



Stuff! In the Mail!

I got a small batch of Cauldron Born Miniatures figures from the Rise of the Powrie KS. Awesome looking figures. Along with the Midlam hobgoblins I've been painting recently (and there are more of those already started on the painting table...) these are some of my favorite recent figures - and I haven't even started painting them. Yet.


I love the painted examples on the KS page, and I'm tempted to try to paint them in similar colors. However, I'm also thinking of red instead. My thought is to use them as an alternate/generic pre-RoC oldhammer/althammer daemon regiment. I will probably paint a single test figure first.



Sea Elf Privateers - Ballista


This started off with the idea of adding additional support to the Sea Elves I finally painted for last year's OWAC. As I was painting them, however, I started thinking about them a little differently.

Sea Elves, yes, but part of a small sub-faction. Whereas the rest of what was previously painted are troops from the merchant houses and their vessels, there are other Sea Elves on the fringes of that Marienburg society. These are privateers in direct service to the Marienburg's Directorate. Sometimes they "stray" into selective piracy. They're tolerated by the mainstream Sea Elf community, but only barely. To the Directorate, however, they are far more useful, if occasionally difficult to control


The figures are from Grenadier's Fantasy Warriors dark elf range, now produced by Mirliton. I like the crew, though the ballista is a bit questionable. I'm not sure I like the color I painted it, either.

I am considering trying to get a small regiment of the infantry and, as mentioned above, utilizing a regiment plus bolter & crew as one of my home-brewed "Regiments of Renown" or OMFG mercenary regiments.

I got this set last year but didn't get to paint it for the OWAC. I was inspired by the ruffled collars and tall boots looking like Blanche-esque nod to 16th/17th century fashion, and a social media comment by Trish Carden about some of her Marauder elf sculpts being inspired by the New Romantics aesthetic.


22 April 2020

Low Rollers Head to the Broken Lands & ZeroTwentythree Paints Plague

I abandoned the battle I had set up as I still needed to resolve how some of the solo aspects of the game would be resolved. Instead I have returned to Sellswords & Spellslingers, since I've enjoyed it and have been wondering what The Low Rollers have been up to. Set up a new game, maybe play a bit tonight...


Our Heroes. The Low Rollers.



The Villains. Vile Goblins.




The heroes have been employed by the residents of a rural village to root out some goblins from the Broken Lands to the west. They have made great use of stealth and have managed to approach very close before being detected... The two "Great Goblins" on larger bases are proxies for Orc Brutes.


The setup.




The Low Rollers were counter-ambushed by far more goblins than they had expected, but 3/4 of the team took them down pretty quickly. Stabby the Shaman spent most of the game on the ground, unable to stand up or do much of anything. Supernatural assistance stepped up in his place, however, as a mysterious spirit killed one of the greater goblins in the distance before disappearing again




Also, I painted an old Plague Elemental from Citadel. There were 7 elementals in the range, the usual 4, plus Life, Death, and Plague. This is the last one I had unpainted. It had been painted many years ago, then stripped more recently but never got around to the repaint. A fitting time to paint him/it, I think...



16 April 2020

Elementals

Following up on a post on FB I posed pics of my Citadel elementals (Plague still not painted.... yet) as well as some other elemental figures..




Edit: I finally painted Plague!









11 April 2020

Solo Battle?

Set up a mostly random deployment for a possible attempt at a solo or solo-ish battle.




04 April 2020

More Sellswords (Solo games 2-4)

After the first game of Sellewords and Spellslingers, I had to restart half of my party as 2.0 versions of themselves. I wanted to give them a second chance since I felt they had been killed by dice and never really got a chance to prove themselves.

For the second scenario, I chose Defend the Villiage, which seemed a little more tame and appealed to my fondness for the Seven Samurai. I set everything up and drew a card for the antagonist and...



Well, I don't have an minotaurs. So I dug around and found a mutant rat ogre! (Boneripper?) Close enough. It's big, has a horn or two somewhere on its body...

The set up.


Several quick dice rolls later he's dead from a fireball and several arrows stuck in his fresh corpse. Game over in moments. The total opposite of the previous game, I made every die roll by a long shot.

So between the two games, I'm a little concerned about the impact of dice on gameplay, while still trying to understand that I rolled mostly 7 and lower in the first games, and nothing but 17 - 20 in the second. Again -- no rules can account for that sort of one-sided rolling.


I decided to replay the same scenario (I spent more time setting up the table than playing the game!) again but with a new draw on the monster cards.

Irony.

Ratmen it is.




After the mutant rat ogre was easily defeated, nearby Skaven agents heavily increased pressure on the small villiage of Geenberg. The Low Rollers, the heroes who defeated the mutant beast had not even left town when the attack began, so they were caught in the middle of a second battle for Geenberg. In spite of poison gas traps and ambushes, the barely adequate heroes managed to defeat the verminous horde, and rescue the townsfolk once more.

Another tense and dramatic Sellswords scenario, a second run through of Defend the Village, the ratmen seemed like an easy win but (like the first scenario) a ton of botched activation rolls (and fumbles like broken bow strings, etc. again) made me seriously concerned for the team's survival again. They barely pulled this one off again. I'm now dumping XP into the Hero trait...


I played one more game after this, but failed to record it with photos. For game 4, I played The Healer, and it went pretty easy I managed to knock out most of the bandits, with just two more entering off the perimeter and being dispatched pretty quickly.

It's been two weeks now, but I'm hoping to pick back up with a few more games this weekend. I'm thinking Sellswords might be a good gateway to try to get my wife & daughter into miniatures gaming...




03 April 2020

OWAC3 March - Elf wardancers

Usually I just post to a link at the Old World Army Challenge. And I still recommend a visit there for all the great entries for the month. But since this months entry had a bit of personal stuff as the world goes crazy... I'll copy the whole thing below.

Still, go to the Old World Army Challenge. Really great stuff there. Lots of Skaven. Filthy disease carrying vermin. Lots of wood elves, defenders of everything that's good and right with the world. And some humans and orcs and stuff too. But especially Skaven and elves this year. ;)

https://oldworldarmychallenge.blogspot.com/



For March's goal, I planned to paint 10 wardancers with double handed weapons. But I found an extra, so it's 11.

In keeping with the grimmer & darker ;) theme for the wood elves, I wanted to do something to make them look more like acrobatic huntsmen/huntswomen than prancing treehuggers. So I took inspiration from the Conan film and Kevin Dallimore's use of the same look on the Harii (Ancient German tribe) he painted years ago. Thus...


Not my best work, but I'm pleased with how they turned out!

March's tally:

11 Wardancers w/double handed weapons ...... 242 pts.

(...242... great, now I've got Headhunter stuck in my head)

Previous Months: 572 pts
OWAC3 Running Total: 814 pts




I've got to admit, this month was hard. I think it's a combination of a lot of things. I just wasn't "feeling it" in terms of sitting down and painting. I had a few days where I just sat down, stared at things for a bit, and then got up. Work stress, worldwide pandemic and all that brings with it, personal health concerns, storms last night knocking out the power and inches away from flooding the basement where my painting table and minis are located!

I feel like I'm fighting to keep my self together some days. Painting has been hard, but I've taken time for some other positive outlets. Fired up the grill for the first time this year. Finally played another one of the solo games I've been planning (Sellswords & Spellslingers - 4 games, in fact) with my Oldhammer figures. Sot it's not all doom and gloom and the apocalypse.




Looking to next month, I'm not sure what's going on. I'd like to keep working on the OWAC. But April is traditionally my own personal giant painting challenge month ("Big April.") Last year I took my mulligan in April to paint giants. This year I was thinking of combining Big April and OWAC in a sense -- paint an ent. They're giant sized creatures, right? Plus I may still be able to work on one or more giants as well.

Or maybe next month the seas will turn to blood, the alien invasion will begin, or... I have no idea anymore. So I'm going to take it day by day. But there's a strong possibility of ent.